Dreamwave's The War Within Series

horizon · Post by **horizon** » Wed Sep 01, 2010 8:48 am

Heya,

sorry if this is the wrong forum...

Anyway, recently I downloaded the War Within series (v1, The Dark Ages and the 3 parts of Age of Wrath).

V1 was pretty okay though jumpy and chaotic to follow at times. A good story which would've benefitted from better storytelling. Good art & colouring.

Dark Ages was really good. Great story & telling. Good art & colouring. Loved it. Shockwave remains to be one of the coolest characters ever.

Age of Wrath, again chaos-y, jumpy. Rushed with no progress. However it had good premises in last part.

Did Simon Furman release notes on the final 3 issues? Has the legal issue been cleared? IS there fanworks concluding the serie?

thanks

Cliffjumper · Post by **Cliffjumper** » Wed Sep 01, 2010 3:16 pm

AFAIK nothing more's come out in terms of plotlines or whatever - not sure if that's legal, or because Furman's been working on IDW stuff. Now he's unemployed (and dare I say unemployable... yeh, I probably do dare, I expect he had an upturned cap in front of him at Auto Assembly) we'll probably find out a bit more.

That said, considering the lamentable conclusions of the first two TFWW minis, there's a fairly good chance he doesn't know how Age of Wrath was going to end... Both series start off very, very well before completely falling apart at the end - the first one is also hurt a lot by Figueroa's pretty but turgid art; I think the impact of DW staff inkers on Wildman's art in the second has been overstated by apologists, as the fact is Wildman's always been hugely overdependant on inkers and it was always likely he'd be paired with a bad one sooner or later - the Dark Ages is basically solid proof of just how good Stephen Baskerville was (the inadvertant humiliation he heaps on Wildman in the Panini Armada comic seals the deal).

Halfshell · Post by **Halfshell** » Wed Sep 01, 2010 4:36 pm

Wasn't Age of Wrath basically going to be "The Quintessons did it."

Christ, I can't even remember what the plot was... beyond "look - Turbomasters!".

horizon · Post by **horizon** » Thu Sep 02, 2010 5:28 am

Hmm,
I think Dark Ages had a nice conclusion. Clear and not a real deus ex machina (like v1 did have(s)).

And Wildman did his best in the US Marvels. Furman as well. I think the conclusion issues (from matrix hunt (minus wild west) to defeating Unicron) are very well written with good art by Wildman & Geoff Senior.

So, I guess Mr.Furman should be harassad on his weblog?

Halfshell · Post by **Halfshell** » Thu Sep 02, 2010 11:54 am

horizon wrote:Hmm,
I think Dark Ages had a nice conclusion. Clear and not a real deus ex machina (like v1 did have(s)).

Er. The hand of Primus reaches out and bitchslaps The Fallen. That's pretty much the definition of Deus Ex Machina. God reaches out and intervenes to wrap up the plot.

Cliffjumper · Post by **Cliffjumper** » Thu Sep 02, 2010 6:53 pm

Yeh, it had last-minute rewrite all over it. TBH the factions stuff early on was much more interesting than any of the Fallen stuff - he really felt like a rogue fan character...

Post by **inflatable dalek** » Thu Sep 02, 2010 8:14 pm

The first one is great right up till the point the flashforwards start. Then it dies on its arse (and as with so much Dreamwave stuff, considering it was a new continuity why tie themselves down so much by showing Targetmasters and Sherman Dam would happen in the future?). The "Megatron loses his memory" bit is a throw the comic against the wall moment as well. Especially as Prime seemingly doesn't, so is the comic saying he's only any good because he's seen how things turn out?

I did like most of the second one, the day in the life little stories in each of the first few issues were all pretty decent (even if perhaps trying too hard to sell a WW ongoing), but the Lottery Hand moment is aweful.

The third was pretty much completely terrible in every way, I'm glad it died.

Cliffjumper · Post by **Cliffjumper** » Fri Sep 03, 2010 6:23 am

Pretty much every DW storyline suffered from an awful conclusion - lots of them had other problems as well, but the bad endings were pretty universal, and it tends to undermine good points about before...

I loved their GI Joe crossover - the art was great, nice to see such a different approach in among the colourful sheen of everything else at the time, brave and pretty much successful relocation of two very 1980s properties to WW2, some great resdesigns, and then in the last issue... well, I'm not sure what happens, but it's not very good. It's the same with Furman's stuff on Armada - each time decent groundwork is blown apart by a botched conclusion, usually involving Skyblast shooting something important.

It's amazing that the one company who's output isn't incredibly frustrating to read are the one company who didn't give a shit if the title lived or died. When IDW hopefully fold and/or do the honourable thing and give the TF licence back to Hasbro and apologise for what they've done, we can only hope it goes to professionals this time rather than some jumped-up franchise renters who run entirely on other people's ideas.

Post by **inflatable dalek** » Fri Sep 03, 2010 7:48 am

I think (perhaps surprisingly considering he was almost the Drift of his day) the Sunstorm arc was the best G1 thing DW did. nice unpretentious action story that managed to be both self contained and yet still have some threads dangling to be picked up later (but not so intrusively it doesn't read well with knowledge they go nowhere).

Post by **Warcry** » Sat Sep 04, 2010 4:20 pm

inflatable dalek wrote:I did like most of the second one, the day in the life little stories in each of the first few issues were all pretty decent (even if perhaps trying too hard to sell a WW ongoing), but the Lottery Hand moment is aweful.

Is it possible for a company to misjudge what their fans would like more than Dreamwave did with the Dark Ages? I've never heard anyone who had a bad thing to say about the interfactional drama at the beginning -- it's probably the only thing Dreamwave have done that doesn't get slated by one part of the fandom or another. So what do they do? Brush it aside half-way through so they'll have more room for Furman to indulge in Grimlock-masturbation and for the Fallen to wander around not making any sense. And then they brush the entire setup aside with a shrug in the first page of Age of Wrath.

inflatable dalek wrote:I think (perhaps surprisingly considering he was almost the Drift of his day) the Sunstorm arc was the best G1 thing DW did. nice unpretentious action story that managed to be both self contained and yet still have some threads dangling to be picked up later (but not so intrusively it doesn't read well with knowledge they go nowhere).

I agree with that. It was fun and it held together on its' own merits without having 100 issues of required reading to understand it, and that alone puts it ahead of most of the output of Dreamwave and IDW.

Post by **inflatable dalek** » Sat Sep 04, 2010 4:26 pm

Warcry wrote:I've never heard anyone who had a bad thing to say about the interfactional drama at the beginning -- it's probably the only thing Dreamwave have done that doesn't get slated by one part of the fandom or another.

I'm not so sure, I enjoyed it, but I recall at the time there was complaints about every issue being so disjointed from the previous one, to the point some were worried about when we were going to stop getting issue one after issue one and when the plot was going to kick in. Of course, when it did people had whole new complaints to make...

Cliffjumper · Post by **Cliffjumper** » Sat Sep 04, 2010 7:39 pm

I think it's more of a case of the factional stuff having some promise and substance, despite being disjointed. Whereas the central plot had neither, and fell into the "NOTHING WILL BE THE SAME!!!!!!!" trap, with added by-the-numbers Grimlock and the Fallen (who really wasn't any better than Drift).

Post by **inflatable dalek** » Sun Sep 05, 2010 2:38 am

The other five issues were excused by Trypticon.

horizon · Post by **horizon** » Sun Sep 05, 2010 6:00 am

That's a thing I wondered about these few comics contained more large drawings (1 page drawings) then the whole series of US marvel G1 together.

At first it looks nice, then it is wasted story-space. And the effect gets lost. I mean when the double paged Unicron showed up in the last Marvel comics it was stunning and new. The impact making use of the giant drawing. It worked perfect in the story.

Oh, should Dan Abnett return and do some Transformer comics?

Cliffjumper · Post by **Cliffjumper** » Sun Sep 05, 2010 12:56 pm

Yeh, sadly it's very widespread now... the Marvel stuff does splash pages sparingly, usually just for big group shots or the like where there's so much going on it's worth it... Dreamwave used them for shots of characters standing up...

Red Dave Prime · Post by **Red Dave Prime** » Tue Sep 07, 2010 3:54 pm

IDW use splash shots for locations, robots standing around, empty space... there is nothing that doesnt become epic-er with a good splash panel

horizon · Post by **horizon** » Tue Sep 07, 2010 6:54 pm

Jee, that is so true. Why didn't I see that....

Post by **inflatable dalek** » Thu Oct 28, 2010 7:50 pm

Cliffjumper wrote:AFAIK nothing more's come out in terms of plotlines or whatever - not sure if that's legal, or because Furman's been working on IDW stuff. Now he's unemployed (and dare I say unemployable... yeh, I probably do dare, I expect he had an upturned cap in front of him at Auto Assembly) we'll probably find out a bit more.

Just glancing through his blog I see he's been selling the script for issue 4 at the last few appearances he's done. You is psychic!